After decades of emergency initiatives and a widespread institutional disengagement, in 2012, Italy adopted the National Strategy for the inclusion of Roma, Sinti and Caminanti communities, which opts for a unifying approach to dealing with the Roma presence. Even though in its formal objectives, the Strategy aims at overcoming the fragmentation of the policies focused on the Roma, seven years after its implementation only disconnected, often inconsistent, interventions have followed. The article examines whether and to what extent the implementation of this document has represented a break with the ambiguities and contradictions that characterised the structure of the relevant policies aimed at Roma integration in Italy before 2012. The analysis highlights a failed activation of the beneficiaries of the strategy in terms of both empowerment and participation in the decision-making arena. Although the strategy represents an unavoidable step – at least from a formal point of view – towards a coordinated approach to a controversial issue, it has failed to trigger virtuous circles able to affect the life conditions of the Roma, which remain alarming.

Racism and racial prejudice, considered a relic of obsolete and outdated social systems, is emerging in the depths of ultra-modern Western societies with different characteristics from the past but with a surprising and worrying virulence. These waves of prejudice and racism testify to the many fears that fill the horizons of advanced societies, undermining not only their internal reliability, but also just their democratic settings. This paper presents a critical review of Islamophobia as a racial prejudice, showing that two main definitions are at work: Islamophobia as xeno-racism or linked to the so-called clash of civilizations. Then, it presents the outcomes coming from a Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI) survey led among a representative sample of the Italian population (n = 1,523) on Antisemitic and Islamophobic attitudes. The cogency and structure of anti-Muslim public discourse and connected mass attitudes, revealed by our investigation, confirm the emergency of these two relevant dimensions of Islamophobia, which claim for a more accurate definition of Islamophobia. Moreover, the distribution of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic attitudes illustrate an interesting overlapping of Islamophobia and Antisemitism which claims that racism is multi-targeted and that there is not so much options between Antisemitism and Islamophobia. Finally, we use three main variables—anomie, ethnocentrism, and authoritarianism—as predictors of Islamophobia and Antisemitism. We tested the strength of these three predictors with the aid of path technique based on multiple regression analysis, which helps to determine the direct and indirect impacts of certain independent variables on dependent variables in a hypothetical causal system.

Nature conservation has often been depicted as an effective policy measure to redress the ongoing environmental problems across the globe. The need to ensure sustainability for people’s secured subsistence has rendered nature conservation an indispensable scheme in the tourism development policy. It is evident that during the last couple of decades, the notion of “conservation” has become less established whilst tourism development has been prioritised as a profit making venture by both the national and international agencies. Numerous solutions have been prescribed by international organisations adopting tourism as an “immense potentiality” which mostly represented a sustainability effort for the local development and environment. South Asia in general and Bangladesh, in particular, are no different, since policy for nature conservation has been misplaced and misread to reach sustainability goals, as it has always been connected with the tourism development agenda. From a systematic literature review, it was found that the use of natural resources by local people was exemplified as a threat to sustainability where the relations between conservation and tourism became a policy issue. The paper intends to problematise the mechanism of tourism policies for nature conservation or conservation policies for tourism development that overlooks the local eco-cultural management practice for sustainability. Along with the environmental discourses, an eco-cultural critique on sustainability was employed.

Leaving from a general discourse about the ambiguous relations between neoliberal policies, housing issues and urban segregation in Europe, we consider the Italian case. We firstly consider the characters of its housing policies, in order to show the most relevant variables in explaining migrants’ segregation. We then consider the case of Milan, with an analysis of segregation processes and of the ambiguity of public interventions, once more considering the mainstream neoliberal discourse on urban and dwelling policie

The appropriation of nature under current capitalist conditions implies the intensification of processes of exploitation of labour, dispossession of peasants’ lands, indiscriminate extraction of raw materials, and racialization of all these processes. These dynamics reveal a double process: from one side we are witnessing a global racialization generated alongside socio-ecological phenomena that are changing for the worse food, energy, land, water, and raw materials regimes. From the other side we are witnessing an imperious use of racist speeches, claims, public measures and violent practices aimed to galvanized the racial and racist spirit of European and American white populations against migrants and refugees driven by the underlying forces formerly recalled. These two dynamics are strictly interlinked. For a long time, researchers dealt with local dynamics and phenomena of racism often forgetting how global, large, planetary processes of exploitation, appropriation, and dispossession sculpt these dynamics at the local level. This article aims to deal with these processes of global racialization and racism by an analysis of the process of accumulation based on ‘racialized unequal exchange’ fostering the idea that that unequal ecological exchange bases on historical division of people in different subordinate races in line with the global neoliberal order.

IL volume intende riflettere sulla promozione a livello di quartiere del social mix attraverso la coabitazione con segmenti di popolazione caratterizzati da maggiori risorse sociali, economiche e culturali raffigura una strategia assai diffusa nel contrasto alla crescente marginalizzazione e segregazione dei gruppi sociali ed etnici più vulnerabili. Gli effetti di questa impostazione risultano deboli rispetto agli obiettivi previsti. In tal senso, la logica del social mix appare viziata da una retorica dell’azione pubblica in cerca di legittimità che occulta i processi di disuguaglianza e da una visione deterministica sui rapporti tra spazio e società. Da queste criticità è necessario partire per comprendere le effettive potenzialità del social mix quale vettore di mutamento